In network elements of a radio access network, such as base stations (or NodeBs or eNodeBs or cells) or radio network controllers (RNCs) of a communication system, anomalies occur occasionally. An example of an anomaly includes a cell outage (e.g., a sleeping cell). These anomalies may be indicated by key performance indicators (KPIs) with unusually poor (low or high) values, and/or by key quality indicators (KQI) with unusually poor (low or high) values. Anomalies may also occur in the form of unusual or broken relationships or correlations observed between sets of variables.
An anomaly has a root cause, such as a malfunctioning user equipment (UE) or network element, interference, and/or resource congestion from heavy traffic. In particular the bottleneck may be, e.g., the uplink received total wideband power, downlink bandwidth (codes or resource blocks), uplink bandwidth (resource blocks), backhaul bandwidth, channel elements (CE), control channel resources, etc.